On Art's Return

Revitalization through destruction

“It's good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won't be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will get in the way of your creativity.”

David Lynch

This week is my 2 year diagnosis anniversary of my Autism assessment. There is no other way to put it but this experience broke my psyche. I don’t need to prove or explain how or why, to anyone. In fact, my words fail me. And I am certain in time it will morph, flooding my artwork and the stories I choose to tell.

I can state with fact life has changed. I envisioned it more like a light switch rather than the gradual shifts Im experiencing, but I’m grateful I have been blessed for the chance to tap back into happy, kind days again.

Maybe not again, but at last.

A major thing I thought would go back to ‘normal’ was making art. I assumed I would be celebrating when the muse came back. It didn’t occur to me that the changes in my life would CHANGE everything-including the way I create.

While I am no longer in a place where nothing comes to me, it is not the same as it used to be. I am not the same. There are new and old stories in me I crave to tell, but in a way I have returned to my beginning—no planners, spreadsheets, or lists—just raw scribblings, notes, voice overs, poetry that I let tell me what to do. Even if its abandon it.

I have been stuck in the dissolution of my print business in 2021. Losing my studio. So many others made it. I couldn’t. I fixate and fixate and fixate on all I have lost.

Losing the plot of why I did art in the first place—before money, before people’s compliments—self expression to understand my own life.

When the inclination to draw again returned, it was just a drip. I spent a good year being angry and sorry for myself, cut off from art and literally having no space in my dwelling to make any. I had to turn digital. I started to play around with various animation apps, and wound up making a short film last year.

Talking to an old art school friend last October, they encouraged me to apply for an animation apprenticeship with the National Film Board of Canada. Spoiler, I didn’t win. However it was a good exercise because A) It gave me a project B) Made me believe a different kind of life for me is still possible

Almost ten years ago now, I developed a world in my imagination to help me cope with the leaving a dating relationship. In fact, that scenario ended up being my final nail in the coffin. After I ended it, I ventured into the thought that I don’t have to do this just because other people do. I never understood its components or why it was of value.

My own company was enough, I wanted for nothing.

A character came out of this that I only saw different, almost 10 years later.

I created this off-world for these inhabitants so long ago, yet when I saw the Artists Call from the NFB to make a pitch on the subject of “People Watching”, it came together for me in a flash:

A space soldier assigned to observe and record earth’s inhabitants is pulled from their solitary work when a child appears, asking to go home.

I did the best I could, but wasn’t selected. It was a tense race—the team unable to decide up until the 11th hour, postponing their official decision til days later. For those few sacred (ha, I typed scared…) days, I pretended I won. How that would change everything, even momentarily. I would come off social assistance, be thrown into art daily, travel across the country, screen a film, meet industry professionals. It felt so right at this point in my life. To be given a break.

Alas.

The amount of rejection I have experienced in regards to my art and career is too robust to recount. It is more the rule than exception. If competition was what Art was about, I would have gotten down about it a long time ago.

Everyone can say No, it doesn’t meet the standards, I’m too abstract when they want realism, too realist when Abstraction is needed. I have fit in places until I didn’t, or became synonymous with something I eventually fell out of love for. I have stopped art for years, suffering Depression, but Art is still there to be rediscovered.

My short film DISRUPTOR is a metaphor for my experience living with Autism, exploring themes of isolation, self-reflection, and reconnection with one’s true self. Childhood memories were inaccessible until my diagnosis at 38, breaking open my psyche to what I often saw people refer to as their “inner child”. It is here where I finally met myself; learning to accept the Little Me who just wants to walk through the world unguarded to get back home where it is safe.

So it was just another No in a lifetime of them. If I was younger, even two years worth, I probably would have taken it worse. But then it occurred to me this story is worth more than the project’s imposed runtime of 01:00. That it didn’t have to die out because a jury of strangers told me so.

But a lot has to be aligned for me to take something on. I really have to listen and be pulled by the next concept sketch, environment drawing, frame, whatever, to keep on it. And if I am not emotionally ready, it will stall on its own accord. I knew deeply I wasn’t ready to face the magnitude of this story I already have mapped in my head.

Because I didn’t win, I wasn’t frantically making this animation in three months, making it possible for an old voice to resurface. One I could take one last chance on.

YEARS ago, my friend who has continued to relentlessly believe in my work, helped me with an idea for a graphic novel. I spent the majority of 2022 trying to find an agent to no avail. Only putting it out there to 24 agents, I got a couple personalized responses that I kept close to my heart.

One being, on their rejection, their opening line was: This is a strong story

Hailey Renfrew from ‘GOOD FRIENDS’

I made like, 9 drafts before I gave up. I just couldn’t break through the wall to something cohesive, or as powerful as it deserved. Sitting in my Drive folder for years, I just listened and felt myself drawn back to it 3 years later to see what I could improve on.

Also, I have a real-life EDITOR now, who I met, funnily enough, through a self advocacy seminar during my diagnostic process.

With their editorial eyes and my new ones, I spent the last month transforming this story to get ready to try, one last time, to find an agent. And if it flops, I actually have another story, ECOTONE, that I have also been working on in silence. 2 full book/stories, ready to go and get judged out in the world.

As I wrote and re-wrote Good Friends and Ecotone simultaneously, the connections between the stories revealed themselves. While wholly different stories, I have found them to be metaphors in your different phases of healing and facing your traumas.

I have put a lot of my ‘content’ work on hold—I have no desire to explain things to people, to teach. There is pressure building to finally be able to express and create, which I have gone years without. And I have to listen to that.

Veronica Tabbott from ‘ECOTONE’

I have everything to gain by trying again and I am not the type of artist to, long term, think anything I put to paper is a waste of time.

To create is all I want. Ive made up my mind. And if I fail

Its just one project closer to my break.